I have a lot of other stuff to write about, especially my wonderful evening with my friends Debbie and Alan on Wednesday, but I'm too tired right now. My goal is to write a longer entry tomorrow.

For now, I just wanted to write a tiny bit about a new art project I've started. A few days ago, I got to thinking about doing a collage about my feelings about the CKD diagnosis and how it affects my life & all that jazz. I've been getting a lot out of creative approaches to the issue, both writing and collage, so I thought it would be cathartic.

So I started gathering relevant collage materials … and gathering … and gathering. I realized that I have so much material that I actually want to make a series of (probably more than 30) collages about the things that led up to the CKD diagnosis, my fears after the diagnosis, my neediness and the support of my friends and family, and my hopes for the future.

I'm going to gather this series of 8.5x11 collages into a sort of book, so that they interact with each other to tell a sort of story that is more complex than any one collage alone. Some pages will be what I think of as a "true" collage: a number of different elements arranged together. But some pages will have only one image on them. Some pages will only have one word (like "lost").

I'm really really excited about the project, and I got a good start on it today in the art room at CWC, and then some more here at home this evening.

It's a great way to sort of explore my feelings and figure things out. I'm very excited about the project.

Oh, also, the folks at CWC are encouraging me to enter a collaged self-portrait I made earlier this year in the annual "Art Slam" at the De Young Museum. It's an annual one-hour slide exhibition of art by artists with disabilities. Their website says, "Art Slam 2013 will be shown in the Koret Auditorium on Saturday, November 2, during the Access Advisors Open House and Disability Arts Festival. It will be available thereafter on the de Young website." I've never entered anything before, though other CWC members often have, but people keep suggesting that I do it, so I probably will. We'll see.